Your character maintains a personal collection of useful information, which can help with both natural and supernatural research. Whether in the form of musty occult tomes, encrypted computer files, sacred scrolls, visual art or stranger media, this library includes reference works that can help him understand both magic and the supernatural world. In both fi elds of knowledge — mundane research and occult lore — this collection relates to one or more fields of specialization.

Each dot in this Merit represents one field of study or area of knowledge in which your character has a wealth of tomes, computer fi les or scrolls, and from which he may draw information. If he has Library 3, his dots might be assigned to demons, cryptozoology and one tradition of thaumaturgy, respectively. Topics can include arcane lore that most people don’t know about, or that has been forgotten since antiquity.

Ordinary people have libraries as well, of course, dealing with less exotic specialties. The study of the supernatural is different from ordinary research. Many occult tomes refer to magical insights that only thaumaturges trained in a particular tradition understand. Aging magical tomes don’t typically use indices, keywords or cross-referenced page numbers — they’re as arcane as the mystics who access them.

Gaining information from a library is a research task, as described on pp. 55–56 of the World of Darkness Rulebook, except that a thaumaturge spends only 10 minutes per roll when researching from his library. Success doesn’t guarantee exactly the information for which he looks. Libraries aren’t all-knowing, and they don’t always provide one definitive answer to a question, since multiple authors may have different points of view on the same subject. The Storyteller is perfectly justified in saying that a particular library simply doesn’t reveal something.

An extended research task performed to gain a bonus on a ritual requires a total number of successes equal to the number of dots in the Merit used to perform the ritual.

Roll Results Dramatic Failure:
The character uncovers flawed or inaccurate information that subtracts one die from the roll to perform the ritual.

Failure:
The character can find no useful information to help him perform the ritual.

Success:
The character finds useful information sufficient to provide him with +1 to his dice pool to perform this ritual.

Exceptional Success: The character discovers large amounts of useful information about performing a ritual and gains a +2 bonus to his Merit dice pool.

This bonus cannot exceed the number of dots in the library he uses, however. Any thaumaturge may allow another practitioner the privilege of consulting his library. Unless this consultant has put points toward the Merit, 30 minutes are spent per roll researching a topic.

Special: Thaumaturges can share Library dots, with each contributing to the facility’s areas of knowledge. These characters each receive the full benefits of the library, and may invite others to use the resource so long as all parties agree. It may happen that thaumaturges suffer a falling out, in which case one or more might be asked to forfeit her library privileges. Those who are banned lose whatever dots they contributed, unless an agreement is worked out to split the library, allowing outcasts to take their areas of knowledge (and dots) with them.